www.scientificamerican.com
OpinionMarch 19, 20255 min readBlaming Mexico for the U.S. Overdose Epidemic Is a MistakeTariffs on Mexico and Canada wont stop the demand for addictive drugsBy Dan Vergano edited by Megha SatyanarayanaThe border town of Tijuana. Sipa USA/Alamy Stock PhotoAs a global trade war starts over President Donald Trumps tariffs, and Wall Street careens madly downward, what continues to get lost is that this whole mess rests on a fallacy about whats driving the flow of illicit drugs into the U.S.In February Trump cited the extraordinary threat posed by illegal aliens and drugs, including deadly fentanyl, to justify 25 percent tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada. A March tariff-tempering easing for auto parts ditched undocumented immigrants for [d]uties imposed to address the flow of illicit drugs across our borders as a rationale.Its a lousy fixboth because it wont work, and because it rests on a fundamentally wrong idea about why the U.S. has an overdose epidemic now killing around 84,000 people a year, according to the most recent preliminary CDC data. While the economic pain of the tariffs and the likely resulting recession would be bad enough, they are the wrong medicine for stopping drug deaths, and might just make them worse. A worse economy will only spur more drug use, increasing the demand that draws easy-to-make, deadly fentanyl into the U.S., and kills so many people.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.No argument, the U.S. has a terrible problem. In the isolation of the COVID pandemic, more than 100,000 people each year died of illicit drug overdoses from 2021 to 2023. Only in 2024 has that death rate subsided to near-prepandemic levels.And fentanyl in the illicit drug market, sourced from criminal cartels in Mexico, killed the majority of those people. (Canada is almost a nonentity in the fentanyl trade.) So pressuring Mexico to somehow stop these cartels from shipping fentanyl to the U.S. with tariffs might, at first blush, sound like a solution.But it isnt. For starters because fentanyl is straightforward to make, cooked up in garbage barrels in garages by amateur chemists, and even easier to ship. Fentanyl is so potent, perhaps 50 times stronger than heroin, that only a few milligrams rests inside each dose or counterfeit pill sold on the street. (Thats one reason why fentanyl kills so many people, because a lethal dose might be only a matter of milligrams, and people using it have no idea how much they are actually taking.)The total amount of fentanyl consumed in the U.S. in 2021 was less than 10 metric tons, within a tractor-trailer load. The U.S. has seized more smuggled eggs than fentanyl at its borders since October. The cartels dont need to make much fentanyl to make selling it highly profitable. Leaving aside Trumps foreign-aid freeze stopping international anti-fentanyl policing efforts in Mexico, tariffs that hurt that nations economy will only make selling fentanyl look more attractive as a business there.Biochemistry explains why there will always be a market. Roughly nine million people in the U.S. misuse opioids, according to federal data, either injected or in pills, with fentanyl now thoroughly flooding the illicit market. Many are physically dependent on opioids, a widespread common effect of regular use. Fail to get a fix, in this case, and you can suffer withdrawal symptoms that, untreated, often cause horrible flulike symptoms and soul-crushing despair. Tariffs or no, people will pay to avoid withdrawal.On a deeper level, the overdose crisis reflects the march toward ever more potent, more dangerous and more synthetic addictive drug use. Before fentanyl, there was heroin. Before heroin, there was morphine. Before morphine, there was opium, which the ancient Greeks saw as a narcotic as early as 800 B.C.E. In drug policy circles, the fentanyl crisis is seen as reflecting Prohibitions Iron Law, where harder addictive drugsas with moonshine replacing beer in the 1920smove into an illicit market inexorably under the kind of police pressure that Mexico is now imposing. We could see a return of carfentanil, an opioid even more potent and concentrated than fentanyl, to the illicit drug market. That opioid single-handedly caused a record increase in overdose deaths in 2017, in an outbreak concentrated in just five states. Theres reason for the carfentanil worry, because overdose deaths have increased on an exponential curve for decades in the U.S., long before fentanyl made the scene.The problem is bigger than fentanyl and its derivatives. There is something more deeply wrong with the U.S. that makes so many people, often ones living in poverty with mental illness or with histories of abuse, turn to illicit drug use. [W]e are frankly unwilling to fix the economic cruelty that drives and keeps people locked in dangerous drug use, as drug policy writer Zachary Siegel wrote last year in Scientific American.Demand from the U.S., rather than supply from elsewhere, whether Colombia for cocaine or Mexico for methamphetamines and illicit opioids, is the real problem. Our justice system and politicians misunderstanding this drove the war on drugs, which tried to militarize away illicit drug use. This has been a catastrophic failure acknowledged across the political spectrum, from the United Nations to the Cato Institute. Yet many Americans remain behind bars, whether in federal or state prisons, for becoming dependent on a chemical that alters their bodies.Trumps tariff policy likewise focuses on the supply of drugs, from Mexico (and Canada, somehow), rather than the inevitable demand for them in the U.S. Our nations long-running inequity spawns this demand. Recessions, which Trump acknowledged might be coming under the weight of tariffs, would only make this worse, as a 2017 International Journal of Drug Policy report found.Of course, illicit drugs are only a pretext for tariffs, part of an America First industrial policy pursued by Trump, one which threatens economic calamity. But linking tariffs to cutting off illicit drugs is politics crafted for popularity with Trumps voters, which is why the White House cooked up the crackpot idea in the first place.It may be simpler to blame Mexico for drug overdose deaths, rather than ourselves. But its a mistake. Instead of bombing Mexico, we should make medications and treatment beds for opioid use disorder more freely available, especially in prisons, where people are most at risk. Only one third of U.S. outpatient mental health facilities offer medications to treat opioid addiction, which is a scandal. The decline in overdose deaths that started last year under the Biden administrations treatment-friendly outlook, argues policies along those lines, and ones producing a historically good jobs market, are what our leaders should pursue. The momentum of that decline, we can only hope, will continue to lead to fewer deaths nationwide.That will be despite any tariffs. The dubious connection of them to fentanyl will only harm the very people who need our help.This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
